We Feebly Struggle

 

Yesterday, as I’ve already mentioned, was All Saints’ Day.
Perhaps you went to the Circuit Service at Clapham to commemorate loved ones, or members of the congregation, or both, who died during the past year.
In many parts of the Church, that actually happens today, which is known as All Souls’ Day; All Saints is specifically for rejoicing with those who are in heaven with God.

In some countries, All Saints’ Day is a public holiday, and people buy flowers, especially chrysanthemums to put on a loved one’s grave.
In some countries, it’s those electronic candles that get put, and cemeteries at this time of year, after dark, are full of twinkling lights; rather lovely.
Some years ago now, Robert and I went on a guided tour of Nunhead Cemetery at about this time of year, and many of the graves had lights or flowers on them.
But by and large, All Saints isn’t celebrated much outside of the Church; in the world, it’s all about Halloween – All Hallows Eve, or All Saints Eve!

What, I wonder, springs to mind when you think of the word “Saint”?
We Protestants don't tend to think of them all that much, really.
I suppose we think of New Testament people, like St Paul,
and people who like the Reform party tend to stick a St George flag on lampposts, as though nobody else cared about this country,
but by and large, saints don't really impinge on our consciousness.
We don't have a formal category of “Saint” in which to put people,

as we believe that all who trusted in Jesus during their lifetime have eternal life.
We don't have the concept of Purgatory, of a time of working off our sins,

as we believe that we have already passed from death into life.
We are all saints!

Then why celebrate All Saints?
What's the point?
Well, in a way that is just the point –
all Christians are saints!

But today is about those who are living, those who are part of the great Church Triumphant, as we call it.
We, here on earth, are the Church Militant, still fighting the world, the flesh and the devil, as the old prayer-book has it.
“We feebly struggle, they in glory shine” says the hymn we'll be singing in a bit.

We don't tend to think too much about what happens after we die.
But if our faith is real, if what we believe is true,
then what happens next is something even greater than we can imagine.
It is our great Christian hope, as St Paul reminded us in our first reading, from his Letter to the Ephesians:

“I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know
the hope to which he has called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,
far above all rule and authority,
power and dominion,
and every title that can be given,
not only in the present age but also in the one to come.”

We have that glorious inheritance.

But it doesn't always seem like it!
As C S Lewis once put it:
“The Cross comes before the Crown, and tomorrow is a Monday morning!”
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine!

But Jesus reminds us that it's okay, a lot of the time, to feebly struggle.
Our second reading was taken from Luke's version of the collection of Jesus' teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount –
actually, I think Luke's version is commonly called the “Sermon on the Plain”, but never mind that now.
The point is that both Matthew and Luke start off their collections with a proclamation of people who are blessed.
Luke says it is the poor, the hungry, and people who are hated,
which he contrasts explicitly with those who are rich, well-fed and of who people speak well of!

Last week’s Gospel reading was the story of the tax-collector and the Pharisee, and I once heard a sermon on this story which reminded us that our values and opinions are not necessarily God's.
And that is certainly the case here –
in the Jewish world, prosperity was seen as a sign of God's blessing,
and poverty was thought rather disgraceful.
Jesus is turning the accepted wisdom upside-down.
No, he says, you are blessed if you're poor, if you're hungry, if you're hurting…
Never believe preachers who tell you that if you’re not rich or successful, you must be a sinner….

Matthew, who was Jewish, couldn't quite bring himself to write that down, and has people being blessed if they hunger and thirst after righteousness,
or if they are poor in spirit, but in many ways the principle is the same, I think.

Of course, we in the First World aren't really poor, only by comparison;
we have food, shelter and clothing,
we have health care and education,
and a general standard of living that our ancestors could only dream of.
So is it woe unto us?

I think it's the same issue that the Pharisee had, who, you may remember,
was so pleased that he fulfilled the criteria for an upright, religious member of the community that he forgot his need of God,
and it was the tax-collector, the hated quisling, who remembered that he was a sinner, and that he had need of God's mercy.
Again, Jesus is turning this world's values upside-down;
it is the despised outcast who went home justified,
and the professionally religious man who, that day at least, did not.

Jesus' teachings, as collected by Matthew and Luke, give a terrific picture of what God's people, the saints, are going to be like.
They'll be people who don't judge others, who don't get angry with others in a destructive way, who don't use other people simply as bodies.
Basically, they treat other people with the greatest possible respect for who they are.
And they trust God.
They don't get stressed out making a living –
they do their absolute best at whatever their job is, of course,
but they don't scrabble round getting involved in office politics in order to get a promotion.
They trust God to provide the basic necessities of life,
but they don't make a parade of being ever so holy, they just get on with it quietly.

Jesus' values turned the world upside-down.
We are almost –
dare I say used to them.
They don't shock us, or strike us as strange –
until, that is, we try to live them!
Then we discover just how far off they are from the values that most people live by.
And what we say we believe comes smack up against what we really believe –
and what we really believe usually wins!
Truly, we feebly struggle!

But the saints in glory shine!
They found the secret of living the way Jesus suggested.
And it wasn't striving and struggling and trying to do it all by themselves.
Remember what St Paul wrote, again.
He prays that we might be given the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that we may know God better.
And he prays “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
and his incomparably great power for us who believe.”

We don’t have to strive to know this in our own strength;
we can allow God to put this knowledge in us and make it part of us.
The saints in glory have done this.
We feebly struggle, but we don't have to,
we can relax and allow God to do it for us.

As we are, we would never inherit the Kingdom of God,
whether on this earth or in the world to come.
But transformed by God’s Spirit, then, in the words of St John,
“We shall be like him”.
And yet, paradoxically, we shall still be ourselves.

St Paul addresses some of his letters to “The saints in such-and-such a town”.
He knew, and they knew, that it was possible to be a saint in this life.
The letter to the Corinthians, for example, begins:
“To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The word “sanctified” means “Being made saint-like”, and it’s one of the things that happens to Christians who are truly intent on being God’s person.
You can’t help it;
the Holy Spirit who dwells in you does sanctify you,
makes you more the person that God created you to be.
We feebly struggle, but the Holy Spirit always wins!

Jesus taught that the values and opinions of God's kingdom are radically different to those of this world.
The saints, those who trust in Christ, all have one thing in common,
and I hope and pray that it's a feature that I share, that you share:
They all knew, and know, that of themselves they are doomed to feebly struggle.
It is only through recognising our own weakness,
our own utter inability to live anything like the sort of life Jesus expects of his followers, that we can be enabled to live that life.
We can do nothing of ourselves to help ourselves, as the collect says.
Jesus has done it all for us; he has bought our entry tickets into glory through his death on the Cross.
And the Holy Spirit will transform us so that one day, one day, we will be among the number of those who “in glory shine”.
Amen.

Nevertheless, she persisted

I totally and utterly forgot to record either the children's talk or the main service. Apologies. 

Children's Talk

I wonder if you’ve ever noticed how many names end in “el” – I’m thinking of names like Daniel or Joel or Michael or Gabriel. These names usually have meanings, and the meaning is often something about God. Michael, for instance, means “Who is like God?”, and Daniel means “God is my judge”.

The thing is, the word “El” in ancient Hebrew, was used for God. El was actually one of the gods in Canaan, but the Israelites used it to mean just God. So names ending in “El” all have something to do with God. In our reading, we have Jacob fighting the angel, and the angel gives him the name “Israel”, which means “One who struggles with God,” And when Jacob realises that it is God with whom he has been fighting, he calls the place where it took place “Peniel”. This, apparently, means “The Face of God”.

One thing to notice about the story, apart from the names, is that Jacob refuses to let the angel go until he blesses him. Jacob is wounded and in pain from his hip, but he will not give in. He persisted. And we’re going to hear a story that Jesus told, in a minute, about someone who persisted. And we’re told that we, too, should persist in prayer.

Prayer is a funny thing, isn’t it? We know that God knows what we need even before we ask. And often, we aren’t even really asking anything specific, especially when it’s intercessory prayer – prayer for other people. We’ll say “God here’s this person with this need, could you do something?” And sometimes God says, yes, here’s this person with this need, what are you going to do about it?

We can’t, of course, make someone feel better if they’re not well, but we can text them and say we’re thinking of them;
if new children come to your school who don’t yet speak much English, you can befriend them, show them what they need to know –
where the toilets are, for instance, or where to go when it’s lunchtime.
If someone’s being bullied, you can help them report it, or just stay with them so the bullies can’t get at them.
That sort of thing.
And the grown-ups will have their equivalents, too.

It’s important to be open to what God might be asking you to do. You don’t have to be BFF with the new kid in your class – but you do have to be helpful and friendly! And you might get a new friend out of it, who knows? But even if you don’t, what you will get is help from God to be nice! So don’t stop asking!

---oo0oo---

Nevertheless, she persisted

 You know, I think Jesus must have a terrific sense of humour. It’s not always easy to find his parables funny, as we are so used to hearing them read in a solemn “I’m-reading-the-Bible” voice that we don’t hear the light and shade in them. But I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if he meant his story of the unjust judge to be funny.

I mean, there is this judge, who seems to like nobody but himself – he doesn’t serve God, and rather despises his fellow-humans. And the widow, who has a cast-iron claim against someone else, who is demanding justice. And not getting it. And the judge keeps on telling her to push off, probably putting it rather more strongly, and yet she keeps on coming back, and keeps on coming back, and finally he gives in and does what she asks.

I am reminded, reading the story again, of the phrase “Nevertheless, she persisted”, which became fashionable a few years ago when they tried to shut up a woman senator in the USA who was saying things thought to be inappropriate – unparliamentary, we would call them in this country. The then Senate majority leader explained, “Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

And “Nevertheless, she persisted” became a rallying cry among women of all ages, nationalities and classes. Particularly, I think, in the USA, where women’s freedom is under threat in many ways, although not, of course, as badly as in Afghanistan. And this woman, this widow, is the absolute archetype of someone who persisted, even though she was told to go away and stop being a nuisance. And in the end, she got her way, purely because of her persistence.

We call the story “the unjust judge”, but really, it’s about the widow, isn’t it? Widows, back in the day, had very little status. They may well have been living in absolute poverty, totally dependent on charity. Mind you, it was part of God’s law that widows, orphans and “aliens” or immigrants be looked after by those who had it to spare. In the book of Deuteronomy, indeed, chapter 27 and verse 19, you are cursed if you do not look after the alien, the widow or the orphan. These people have no male protector to look after them, so it’s your job!

You can’t really equate the judge with God, nor the widow with us, although it does feel like that sometime. One source I read when researching this sermon pointed out that it’s really about a flea biting a dog.

It’s amazing how disturbing a small irritant can be. Think of what it’s like when you get a mosquito in your room, and you can hear it whining and whining, but you can’t see it – nor, indeed, feel it until next day when you have one or several itchy bites on your person! As the song says “A flea can bite the bottom of the Pope in Rome!”

Women persist. Women always have persisted. As American writer Valerie Schultz put it: “We women persist. Isn’t that our job? Throughout history, we have persisted in our quest for respect, for justice, for equal rights, for suffrage, for education, for enfranchisement, for recognition, for making our voices heard. In the face of violence, of opposition, of ridicule, of belittlement, even of jail time, nevertheless, we have persisted.”

And because of our persistence, things have happened. Women, in most countries, can now vote – in the UK, universal suffrage only became a thing in 1928, less than a century ago, and in many countries it didn’t happen until more recently. It’s only since 1975 that women can open a bank account or take out a mortgage or even a credit card without a male guarantor – 1975. That’s only 50 years ago! Well within many of our lifetimes.

But in theory, at any rate, women have equal rights with men in this country, although there are still visible pay gaps in certain industries, and for many, other factors such as race come into play. I’m well aware that I’m speaking from a position of White privilege – and a privileged background, at that! I went to an all-girls’ school, and there was no nonsense about girls not being good at STEM subjects, or anything like that.

Sadly, though, in many countries women do not have equal rights, particularly in Afghanistan, and many of my American women friends are afraid that their rights are being eroded.

But back to our parable. It’s not an allegory, you can’t just equate the judge with God and the woman with us, but it is about prayer. God is not an unjust judge – God’s greatest delight, after all, is to give us more and more; remember when Nathan confronted David after he’d had an affair with Bathsheba and got her husband killed? God said to David, through Nathan, that had what he already had not been enough, God would have delighted in giving him twice as much!

Prayer is an odd sort of activity, isn’t it? Especially what’s called intercessory prayer, which is when we ask God for other people, and for ourselves. You would think God would know people’s needs before they ask – and of course, God does! But we are told to pray; it seems in the Bible that it’s absolutely indispensable. Jesus assumed that people prayed; you might remember that he said “When you pray....” rather than “if”. Yet God already knows people’s needs. Like when you see on social media that a friend is poorly or something, and you stop what you’re doing and say a little prayer for them, even something like, “Dear God, please look after them and help them feel better.” God already knew they didn’t feel great....

I don’t know why we are told to pray, but we are. It seems as if prayer creates a condition, an energy if you like, that enables God to work. I do know that when we pray, things change. We change. The more we pray, I think, the closer we come to God, and the more we are enabled to see things from God’s point of view. We aren’t telling God what to do, although it might start off feeling like that; we are barely even asking, other than to say here’s this person with this need, can you do something about it? And, as I said to the children, sometimes God says, yes, here’s this person with this need, what are you going to do about it?

That’s the thing, isn’t it? We are very often called to be the answer to our own prayers. We can’t make someone feel better if they are ill – but we can make them feel loved and appreciated by visiting them, or sending flowers or a card or a tiny present of some kind. We can, and indeed should, welcome new people into our churches and communities, telling them about local activities and community groups or sports clubs they might like; as I said to the children, at school they can help newcomers, especially those who don’t speak much English.

It’s more difficult when it comes to bigger issues, though. We can often help our family and friends, and I do think that it’s always right to name their names before God and to ask God’s blessing on them. I think, too, we need to do the same for our leaders. I know it feels counter-intuitive to pray for someone whose views are not our own, and which, indeed, we may find abhorrent, but we are told to pray for our leaders – and, indeed, for our enemies.

Having said that, of course, we must never sit down under injustice, and must protest it wherever we find it, whether it’s someone at work or college being bullied or treated unfairly by a superior, or whether the government is about to propose something we find unjust or hateful.

Don’t forget, of course, that we don’t have to do any of this in our own strength. The one who calls us will enable us! God delights, as I said above, in giving us what we need and more than that! One of the best things we can pray for is for more of God’s good gifts, which he gives us for his delight, but which do, incidentally, enable us to serve him better.

We seem to have got away from the persistent widow. But she is our example. God is not an unjust judge, but we still need to persist in prayer, and in doing what we can to bring about the answers to our prayer, if it’s something obvious we can do. Because, you see:

God is not an unjust judge.
God is never going to tell us to go away and stop being a nuisance!
God is always going to listen to us when we pray, although sometimes the answer will not be what we expect.
God loves us and delights in being generous to us!
Amen!